When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-seller, Outliers, suggests the reason students of South Korea, Singapore, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan show the highest math scores is, 

“…they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. These are the kinds of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like ‘No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.’”

According to Gladwell, when things got tough out in the rice fields, the workers got tough, right back, by repeating more maxims like the following:

“No food without blood and sweat.”

“Farmers are busy; farmers are busy; if farmers weren’t busy, where would grain to get through the winter come from?”

“In winter, the lazy man freezes to death.”

“Don’t depend on heaven for food, but on your own two hands carrying the load.”

“Useless to ask about the crops; it all depends on hard work and fertilizer.”

“If a man works hard, the land will not be lazy.”

What Gladwell proposes is, since the culture of these countries is to work as long and hard as it takes to produce the best rice and the most rice possible, for the children, that ethic transfers to the classroom when solving math problems. Whereas some students, after sometimes minutes, give up and ask for help when they get stuck in complex math problems, those conditioned to work through tough situations, like rice farmers facing bad weather, seem to have an overdrive gear that drives intentness, resourcefulness, and dogged endurance.

Gladwell has a tendency to oversimplify things, perhaps because it makes for a good read. Therefore, let’s not take his conclusion as gospel. However, he does bring up something that has merit and has been proven. Teachers that make students struggle to arrive at solutions on their own, are good teachers.

Allow Students to Struggle
In their book “The Teaching Gap,” Stigler and Hiebert described a remarkable instructional strategy they observed Japanese math teachers using. After introducing a new problem, and knowing students have acquired enough information to solve the problem, teachers ask students to develop their own solution methods. They can refer to note cards the teacher has prepared and sometimes they are permitted to collaborate. Having done this all through school, it comes as no surprise to the students. Getting the right answer is not the main point; developing a solution method on their own that gets the right answer is what is expected. And they are to do this without the teacher’s assistance. The teacher expects the students to use what they have been learning all along in the class as a resource for developing the solution method. As the students work, the teacher circulates and makes notes. When the students have finished, the teacher selects students to present to the class the solution method they have developed. The teacher will select several different approaches. Once the students make the presentation and explain their thinking, the teacher uses what they wrote on the board to deliver instruction. To the surprise of many, the homework that day might be another novel problem the students have never seen; one problem to take home and struggle with that will demand they use the concepts and skills they have been learning in the course of the math class.

Making students sweat and struggle is a key to Japanese teaching and is a reason those students are ahead of the rest on international tests of mathematical achievement. Japanese teachers have learned the irreplaceable value of allowing students to become “tough” by working through a problem. 

Creating a Culture
In this country, we have a different method of teaching math; generally speaking, we teach rote memory and procedures. Typically, an American teacher will describe and demonstrate to the whole class how to solve a problem. The teacher may solve several examples, and ask if everyone understands. Then the teacher presents a problem the whole class solves; someone is invited to give the answer. If more than a few get the wrong answer, the teacher will demonstrate some more examples. Once confident most can do the procedure, the class might be assigned a page in the textbook to complete while the teacher goes to the individuals who seemed to be struggling during the demonstration. In contrast, Japanese students are asked to solve fewer problems and do more thinking and problem solving. The goal of the Japanese teacher is for students to “see” and “understand” the connections between mathematic concepts so that when presented with a problem, they comprehend the reasoning involved in solving it. Instead of memorizing and practicing the procedures for solving dozens of the same kind of problems, the goal of Japanese math teaching is to prepare students to solve problems they’ve never seen and when there is no one to help them.

Does this teaching strategy have merit and is it good pedagogy? If so, we must change the culture of teaching in this country. Can American teachers arrive at the conviction and patience to allow students to struggle and think, and in so doing, make them “tough?” Some would say “No.” I say “Yes.” Any teacher, whether in the classroom, on the court, or on the field, can develop a culture where students are encouraged to work things out themselves, an environment where students teach each other (small groups) and themselves.  And only when the teachers see the students have exhausted all resources, is help given, enough help to get them going again.

So how can teachers develop this type of culture? They must deeply understand and believe, prematurely showing students how to solve a problem might be doing them a disservice. They must come to the conviction the worst thing for the student is to give them the answer or the process to get the answer, and the best thing is to allow them the chance to exhaust everything they have to solve the problem.

This is contrary to the belief of many instructors, perhaps thinking that learning is best achieved through small and successful steps. Some feel the students’ pain and can’t stand to watch it. Others listen, with an empathetic ear, to students that complain, whine, and make excuses as to why they “can’t” do it. These teachers must morph from empathy to joy by challenging students. Did I say “joy?” Yes, I did. With a true understanding that struggling makes one mentally tough, and toughness is what you need out in the world to solve problems, they actually smile when they see students frustrated yet working.

Application
Is the effectiveness of this concept limited to mathematics, or to the classroom for that matter? Not at all. It works for other basics such as spelling and reading, and for any other subject like history, economics, and science. It works in any discipline where there are problems to be solved.

It also works in sports. One of John Wooden’s most effective teaching tools was making his players struggle. Equipped with the necessary basics and concepts of his system, we were thrown into a competitive situation, in practice, that required, for example, an offensive group of three players to solve a difficult problem presented by the defense. At first, the execution was ugly but Wooden didn’t stop play to give us the solution. What he did was, sparingly, give us bits of information in his characteristic short, concise statements, and then had us keep trying, again and again until the time allotted for the drill ran out. For the most part, we had to work the problem out ourselves while he just stood there, silent, with a self-satisfied look that I now understand. While we were, repeatedly, disgusted with ourselves because we kept failing, he was actually enjoying the moment.

Conclusion
Malcolm Gladwell is quick to come up with one answer, one outlier, he thinks is the only cause for something when, in fact, there is usually more than one reason. However, he did bring up one good point: In the culture where hard work and working through problems is the norm, in the classroom, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. 

I am not proposing we abort all other teaching methods and, exclusively, use this approach. Rather, what we can do is enhance more learning opportunities by making our students struggle to learn on their own while we are with them, so they are prepared to do the same when we are not. Good teachers know when and when not to do this. But, when the time is right, the process makes students tough. Perhaps the entire subject can be summed up by John Wooden.  

“Don’t do anything for your child that he or she can do for themselves.”